Porn blockers — not just for kids

Dave Matthews, founder of PageClean, an Internet-filtering program for mobile devices, knew there was a market for blocking children from seeing porn. But after getting into the business, he began to see an unexpected phenomenon. "I started getting customers asking me to lock their phones and not send them the password," he tells me. These fully grown adults were asking his company to protect them from themselves.

PageClean isn't alone. Famed porn-blocker Net Nanny polled its customers last year to find the median age of the person the software is used to "protect." Thirteen, you might guess? Nuh-uh. Try 24.

"There are many adults who wish to protect themselves from pornography," says Russ Warner, president and CEO of Net Nanny. "And we have requests almost weekly from adults who want our customer service reps to manage their password" -- in other words, to keep their password from them so they can't circumvent the software. "We also know that many of our customers are women who wish to filter out porn for their husbands and boyfriends," he tells me.

Welcome to the new age of porn-blockers. It's not just for kids anymore. Gives a whole new meaning to "parental control software," doesn't it?